In my prior note I had meant to comment on Carl's comments a few days ago.
In particular:
And he hardly ever mentions the concrete social organization of activities
such as work, family, medicine, education, government. In the entire book he
only refers to social class twice and to alienation once. And he only spends
a few sentences on them. The entire rest of the book ignores the concrete
social relationships of people. It talks in general terms of hierarchical
arrangements of personality traits, about the transformation of subjectivity
into objectivity, about the mediated nature of stimulus-response, about
affective signals for emotions. While these are impt. ideas, they don't
touch on the cultural aspects of human psych.
I believe this is typical of the entire Russian/Soviet approach to
activity theory and cultural-historical psych. It fails to deliver its
promise to relate psych. to concerete social activity. I think this is a
major failure that must be corrected if activity theory is to be realized
and if a concrete cultural psych. is to be developed.
I think these observations are correct and said so in CP. They are
closely connected with others' comments on the greatly reduced role
that culture, as we are used to speaking of it in current academic,
Anglo-American discourse (at least) plays in ANL's thinking which
often refers to culturology and does not make it past the 1940's.
As to attacks on activity theory. Intemperate article titles like that
cited by Carl are not at all helpful to the development of scholarship.
When I encounter such examples, I go out of my way to express my dismay
to those responsible. Its difficult enough to figure things out without
people throwing sand in your eyes while you are trying to read.
mike
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